


Rotation

by apparitionism



Series: Dynamics [2]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 21:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1914165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Helena George Wells…”</p>
<p>“But why was her name George?”</p>
<p>“Because a long time ago, her mother was fortunate enough to dance for George Balanchine.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rotation

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot leave well enough alone, so: it is back to ballet. I got to wondering after "Fluidity": that body that Myka realized she loved to touch—how did it come to move through that fluid we lesser beings call air? What made it find real success at such movement? So here is a rotated rumination on that question, as well as on how those two bodies we love so much collided, then caromed off each other… then managed to come back together again.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Helena George Wells…”

“But why was her name George?”

“Because a long time ago, her mother was fortunate enough to dance for George Balanchine.”

“What happened after that?”

“She fell in love with a wastrel.”

“What’s a wastrel?”

“Your father. Do you want a story or not?”

Almost every night of Helena’s young life, she and her mother exchanged these words. And the ritual ended with Helena affirming that yes, she did indeed want a story, and insisting that it end not with the little girl named Helena George Wells falling in love with a wastrel, but rather with her becoming a prima ballerina.

How her mother had managed to craft so many different stories that ended that way, so many different ways of ensuring that that was Helena’s story, the teenage Helena cannot remember. She now sees only one way to becoming a ballerina: work, work, and more work. She knows she has talent. She can feel it in her body, the way it responds when called upon, and she can see it in the way it moves in comparison to the bodies of other dancers. She owes it to her mother’s memory to make the most of that talent.

So she does.

****

She is fifteen years old. She cannot remember a time when her feet were not blistered, caused her no pain, had no difficulty sliding into the street shoes that her friends from school wear with such ease and style.

“We’re going out dancing!” they exclaim. “Come on, Helena!”

And she wonders what they think she does before school, after school, in all of the moments about which she says, “I can’t, I have practice.”

At sixteen, she is admitted to the Royal Ballet School, the program for older students, at Covent Garden. She had known it was her only hope—there is no more money; her father, who is indeed a wastrel, has long since drunk away what her mother left them.

Helena sees, with her admission, that she truly can do anything she sets her body and mind to do. Anything. She can achieve any level, dance any part. She simply has to concentrate. She has to concentrate, and that means eliminating all distractions.

So when her best friend from school, a girl with whom she had exchanged all manner of mash notes and endless promises of future devotion, thinks to continue their association? Helena begins to establish a distance from her. Helena begins to say things such as, “No, I don’t believe I am free at any point this weekend.”

She is not particularly proud of such statements. But they are not entirely untrue: she does not see any room for freedom in, any space for deviation from, her chosen course.

****

She decides on America because there is more opportunity there—and also because she will be in some sense exotic, will attract attention in ways that she would not at home. She leaves when she is twenty-two, with a suitcase full of dance gear and very little else. 

Her father is entrusted to relatives, cousins of a great-aunt, in Reading. Helena promises him that she will write, yet the idea that he will stay with them long enough to receive any letters from her is ludicrous; they both know it. They know that he will be back on the streets in London, a pint or bottle somewhere near, in a matter of days. They know, too, that her leaving is her leave-taking.

“Miss your mother,” he mumbles as she embraces him.

“So do I,” she tells him.

Those are their last words to each other.

****

America opens the world to Helena. It also closes it further. Dance is all there is, but what dance! 

She is awarded a place in the corps de ballet at the New York City Ballet… the company founded by George Balanchine. She thinks of her mother all the time. She dances in the revival of the Martins _Swan_ _Lake_. She tries but fails to keep from envying the soloists, the principals. She is impatient, but she puts her head down. She works. They are more athletic here… she must be cleaner, crisper. She must exert more effort so that she can soar more effortlessly.

She must contrive to stand out even as the background comprises her and fifty other dancers who have the same goal. “You will never be the one who works the hardest,” one of her instructors at the RBS used to tell her and her classmates as they addressed the barre. “Not in ballet. It is impossible. Someone, somewhere is always working harder than you are. Than you ever can.”

But even he had eventually had to concede that Helena Wells might be able to do the impossible.

She does the improbable, if not the impossible: after a short time, she auditions for, and receives, a place in a smaller company, not as a member of the corps de ballet, but as a soloist. It is a smaller company, yes, but it is important: it is where Warren Bering creates the costumes that become iconic.

She works harder, practices more. Her feet protest, but she ignores them, as she always does. She is a soloist for three months.

Then the company mounts a long-anticipated _Giselle_.

****

Helena is a new face, a new body, and ballet needs the new, needs to bring in newer, younger audiences. She will appeal to them, it is decided. She will be beautiful and dance beautifully in a way that is both classical and modern.

Warren Bering costumes her in just this way. He holds fabric against her body, measures, assesses. At one point, he tells her, “I’ve been planning a while for this Giselle.” What this seems to mean is that Helena herself is unimportant to the process. It is _this_ Giselle, not Helena’s. She feels… but it does not matter how Helena feels. She is a body that will be costumed, that will dance, as she is directed to do. She does not like what the costumes do to her body, but that could not matter less. She is working. She is doing what she came here to do. Her mother, she thinks, would understand.

****

She does not think much about her dresser, Myka—an intern—when they first meet, other than “she is tall; she is shy.” She thinks a bit more during dress rehearsals, when Myka puts her into her costumes for the first time. Myka’s hands are both gentle and strong, competent, quick. She knows exactly what she is doing; at no point does Helena have to say “not so tight” or “faster, please.”

So it is not Myka’s fault that Helena feels so… unfree in the costumes. There must be something about her body that Warren Bering did not like, she thinks, something that he believed was keeping his costumes from looking their best.

She goes to the theater very early one day to dance the choreography in place, rather than in a practice studio. Now that she has made her way through some performances, she knows that she _can_ dance it, but is not sure she is doing the part justice. In her arabesque, she feels the occasional odd pull, and her stop at ninety degrees feels awkward, out of balance. No one can see—they would not let her keep dancing if they could _see_ how her body feels. Now as she runs though it, as she dances as much of it as she can as herself and not as costumed Giselle, she knows it is indeed something to do with what she wears.

So that’s it, then. She can’t do anything about the costumes, so she will put her head down and she will work. She stays on the stage, though; she keeps performing the steps, simply because it feels right and good to be here, moving her body in the very early morning.

Then Myka appears, as if from nowhere. And Myka, as if she were made of magic, fixes everything.

****

They meet four mornings in a row, one morning for each costume Helena wears. Myka dresses Helena, Helena dances, Myka watches. Then, if Myka can’t see the problem—and mostly she can’t, though on the second day she did instantly—she will come to Helena and ask for a quite specific movement, one that will help the costume tell her hands what must be changed.

On the fourth day, Myka requests a fouetté en tournant. She will hold Helena’s waist as a partner would, and Helena can’t help but be reminded of the first day’s penché, when Myka knelt before her just as Liam, the production’s Albrecht, did in performance. Helena had had the brief thought that the world would be a finer place if all Albrechts could look like this.

So today she turns and kicks—and Myka is tall enough, with long enough arms, to hold Helena properly so that she does not have to worry that a kick might connect—and feels the strange not-quite-rightness that is particular to this costume.

“Hm,” she hears Myka say as she whips around. Then she hears, “…maybe…” and Myka’s hands slide down to her hips. Helena gasps at her body’s immediate response. She cannot manage even one more rotation.

Myka’s eyes widen. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

Hurt? God, no… Helena thinks she might die of embarrassment, but she is by no means hurt. She says, “Nothing. Just a twinge.”  

“Twinges are bad,” Myka says solemnly. “One wrong twinge can do you in.”

Helena wants to tell her, “You do not know the half of it, you with your seductive hands,” but she keeps her mouth shut. She has no idea what Myka would think of such a statement, and Helena is staggeringly out of practice in that arena anyway, because when has there been time?

The idea of Myka simply being her dresser is intolerable now, though, so when Myka tells her that she is, or intends to become, an engineer—one with, Helena thinks, an uncanny knowledge of costuming—Helena hits upon the perfect idea: she will present herself to Myka as a problem. As the costumes have shown, Myka clearly cannot resist a problem.

Their meetings are perfect—and perfectly frustrating. Every time Myka puts her hands on Helena, Helena melts a little more. Every time Myka looks at Helena and pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and _thinks_ , Helena aches a little more. Every time Myka says something effortlessly charming, such as “I wonder if there’s a way to make vortex generators work on a body that rotates,” Helena falls in love a little more.

She has been teased about it. Liam, who is also being given an enormous first chance here in dancing his Albrecht to her Giselle, says to her, sing-song, _during a performance_ , “I see how you look at her…”

Helena almost loses her legs completely. She glares at him as best she can without breaking character, and as soon as she can, pulls him aside and says, “If you _ever_ do that to me again, I will ensure that you are incapable of dancing for a very long time.”

Liam has the grace to look at least a bit concerned. He shuffles his feet at her in a small apology. He says, “All right. That’s fair for the show. But I see that you aren’t arguing with the _how you look at her_ part. And you haven’t even asked which _her_ I mean.”

But what would have been the point of that? How Helena looks at Myka is, she knows, very very obvious to everyone. Everyone, of course, except Myka. Helena has tried to school her features, but the fact is, she is near Myka—near her when other people can see—at those times when the stage mask _has_ to drop, as when she is undergoing a rapid costume change and Myka’s hands flash over her with urgency, pulling her out of one costume, wrapping her in another, and Helena knows perfectly well that to Myka she is just a body then, too, just a body standing still in space… but she feels as if she is drowning in the air Myka calls a fluid, or perhaps it is that she is trying to breathe love itself. And that is impossible to hide from anyone. Except Myka.

So, no, she can’t pretend, to Liam or to anyone else, that she feels anything other than what she feels. But she does, however, begin to tease him in return, for it is clear to her (and to everyone else) that Liam himself has a very sweet crush on Steve, who dances Hilarion. “It’s something of a cliché, isn’t it? For two boys in the same company to fall in love?” she asks.

“Two boys in the same company have not fallen in love,” he says. “Because it’s pretty clear that Steve isn’t in love with me.”

“Then our situations are not so different after all, because it’s quite clear that Myka isn’t in love with me either.”

At this, Liam laughs. He has a donkey-bray laugh, a huge “bwah-hah!” that is almost enough in itself to make Helena giggle like the schoolgirl she has not been for a long time. “I saw you with her!” he accuses. “Two days ago, in Dayton! I got to the theater early because I was confused about the time zone, and I saw you!”

“You saw us what?” Helena asks. She is certain they must have been doing what they always do: Helena dancing, and Myka studying her.

“She had her hands all over you!”

“That didn’t mean anything,” Helena tells him, though she knows that that is not true, at least not for her, as the one being touched. “She’s trying to figure out how I move.”

And Liam snorts. “I bet she is.”

“It isn’t like that.” She sighs. “I wish it were.”

Myka is, as far as Helena can tell, in love with the idea of Helena as an engineering problem.

Helena is in love with the idea of Myka as an engineer. As an endlessly fascinating engineer who has those endlessly stimulating hands and an endlessly enchanting smile, rarely and shyly offered, that makes Helena feel as if she’s been awarded a medal.

“She doesn’t know I’m alive,” she says to Liam. He brays again; she knows he thinks she means it as the cliché… but it’s true. Aside from those very rare smiles, Myka looks at Helena like she is nothing but a… well, Helena doesn’t remember much about physics, and she knows almost nothing about engineering, so she can’t put a suitable name, even a facetious one, to what Myka sees her as. But she is sure that it, like all the words Myka murmurs when she is theorizing and calculating, is quite clinical and mathy.

And whatever it is, Helena yearns to hear Myka whisper it to her in the middle of the night as they interact in every way two bodies can.

She is so preoccupied by such ideas that she finds the situation genuinely comical, almost Liam-bray-worthy: she is dancing the most important role of her career, and she is barely thinking about it. She is dancing the most important steps she has ever danced, every performance, and she is barely thinking about them. As the run goes on, she thinks less and less of her dancing and more and more of Myka, of the time they spend together.

Also comical is her indecisiveness. Oh, she will be quite certain on any given morning, before Myka walks into the theater: today is the day, she will think, that she casually says, “Myka, would you like to have dinner with me after the performance?”

But then when Myka walks in, she loses her nerve, because what if Myka says no? If she says no, then there will be no more possibility that she will say yes.

As the days pass, however, she sees that there are fewer and fewer opportunities. Weeks ago they seemed almost unlimited; now she can count them on one hand.

She tells herself: all right, today. If there is an opening, today, then today is the day.

“Could you do some pas de chat?” Myka asks. “Because your back—if I were to put a panel against your back, I think…”

So Helena does, and Myka watches, and then Myka of course then puts a hand on the small of Helena’s back as she prepares to do them again. Helena has learned to control her initial response to this, but it is still so, so difficult not to grab that hand and pull it around herself, as if Myka were going to support her in a backbend, as if she were going to fall into that backbend and Myka were going to bend over her and… and that is exactly the kind of initial response she has to work so hard to control.

Pas de chat, pas de chat, pas de chat—and suddenly she is sprawled on the floor. Myka has, improbably, knocked her over, but here is her opening, for now Myka is helping her up, now Myka is practically holding her in her arms, and not at all in a clinical or mathy way. Helena tries to start small: she tells Myka what happened the previous night, after the show, when that woman seemed genuinely to think that Helena would just… right there in her dressing room, even. And now she tries to say it: “When I feel like it’s written all over me… that my interests lie elsewhere.” She tries to make Myka look at her, so that maybe she will now, for once, just read her and not try to solve her.

But Myka won’t look at her. She will barely even speak to her, and Helena knows that she has made a monumental error, that her worries about Myka saying no were well-founded. Perfectly founded, in fact, because as the remaining days spool away, Myka doesn’t look, and doesn’t speak, and certainly doesn’t touch, any more than is absolutely necessary.

****

By the time the company returns home, Myka has disappeared, off to graduate school, Helena presumes, and out of her life completely. She tries to explain to herself very clearly and sternly that it is for the best, that Myka was a distraction, that now she can get back to the business of dancing.

Waiting for Helena in her dressing room is a box.

Myka has kept her promise: the box contains a leotard. At first glance, it is simple, black, basic. But then Helena lifts it from its wrapping, runs her hands over it. It is… as if someone has made a leotard for practicing American football, not ballet.

She puts it on. She tries not to allow herself to imagine Myka putting it on her.

She essays a few steps, a combination, a series of pirouettes, a grand jeté.

She can’t dance in it, and she wants to cry, because she knows that if Myka were here, all she would have to do is touch Helena as she moves, as she does something as simple as a balancé, and her hands would know what was wrong, she would know how to fix it, and she would fix it, and Helena would dance for her, and Myka would finally _see_ that it was _for her_.

****

Helena applies herself to her dancing with even more focus. She is invited to audition as a principal for a larger company—the artistic director saw a performance of _Giselle_ during the tour and was impressed. She receives an offer, so she takes it. She must keep moving, away, up.

At her new company, Helena is surprised to find herself lonely. She misses Liam—and Steve, who, as it turned out, was in fact absolutely smitten with Liam—terribly. She misses Myka too, but the _way_ she misses Myka turns out to be more familiar than she had expected. It is very similar to how she misses her mother: as an essential piece that should be present, that _is_ present for her, present to her, but gone too. There and not there. Her mother telling stories; Myka solving problems.

Nature abhors a vacuum, however (this is one thing she remembers from science), and Helena does not resist much when a lovely Russian soloist named Irina, clearly working her way through the company, decides that Helena will be her next conquest. Helena knows she is being used. She uses Irina in return. Irina is not tall and dark; she does not look intently at Helena and think. She does not think much at all, as far as Helena can tell; she certainly would not say distracted words about variables and equations and fluid dynamics. But she is a woman, she has a body, and she does not care at all what Helena wants, or doesn’t want, from her.

“Rebound,” Liam says. He has called to check up on her.

“No,” Helena hears Steve say in the background. “Understudy.”

“Neither,” Helena says. You can’t rebound from something that didn’t happen. And no one can even pretend to play what she had hoped Myka’s role in her life would be. “Just… an opportunity.”

****

Helena takes other opportunities, sometimes. Not always. Not often. Liam doesn’t say “rebound” anymore; Steve doesn’t say “understudy.” But they both look at her, when they see her, as if the word they want to use is “mistake.” She can’t really disagree.

And still, the day she sees a very young dancer wearing a very new, yet very familiar leotard, she is not overjoyed. She knows immediately, upon buying one and putting it on her body, and she is frightened. Because now she could find her. She could probably have found her before, but now this is a sign that she should find her. She should find her and try again, because if she finds her she _will_ try again, but she might find her and find that rebounds and understudies and mistakes are all there will ever be.

She is coming to understand the depth of feeling that motivated her mother to bundle up her life, put it on her back, and follow a wastrel.

Helena tells herself that she will start small—just search a little, see what she can find out about the connection between “Myka” and “Bering.” For Warren Bering’s name is on the leotard.

Six hours later, she is still in front of the screen, scrolling through pictures of Myka Bering and her ex-girlfriend, messaging her agent to get her a meeting with the makers of these Bering leotards, and yes she will indeed endorse them or whatever is necessary so _get it done now_.

Six weeks later, she is breathless and naked on a dressing-room sofa in the arms of an equally breathless and naked Myka Bering, so instantly in love and alive again that she can barely believe any time has passed since that summer six years ago.

Helena’s first sight of Myka the day before, when she snuck into the video shoot—Myka had obviously continued to think that no one noticed her, that she could sneak into and out of theaters, though she is so tall and striking that _everyone_ sees her, always—had nearly felled her, but she covered it, she thought, quite well.

Her second sight of her, an hour ago, striding down the aisle to the stage, her surprise edged with annoyance—that sight nearly felled her too. It was the hands that saved her, the hands that convinced Helena not to lose her nerve this time. The hands that slid right into place on Helena’s body. That they had carried misunderstandings about each other for _years_ didn’t matter at all. Myka’s hands were where they belonged, Helena’s leg was raised in what she knew was a perfect one-hundred-eighty-degree penché, and she could have held that pose forever.

But not forever, of course, and better that she dropped it, anyway. She’d been holding a pose for six years. And now she could finally lean down, easily, with Myka’s hands still on her, and kiss the woman she was in love with, and _say_ that she was in love with her, with no poses, no pretenses. No more pretending not to react when Myka touched her, no more acting as if she didn’t sigh at the way Myka looked at her. She could say, as she did later, that she wants to study Myka’s body with her own hands every bit as thoroughly as she herself has been studied. That she might not know the right equations, but she certainly can devote herself to learning how Myka moves.

And Myka looks her in a new way, a way Helena would not have been able to explain, even a day ago, that she wanted. Myka says, “My prima engineer.”

****

Helena is still somewhat wary of Myka’s father, both because he is _Myka’s_ father and because he is Myka’s _father_. And fathers, in her experience… well, and he is also Warren Bering, always.

But at the wedding—it takes place a year, almost to the day, after they are reunited—he asks Helena for a dance. And during that dance, he says to her, “I guess I can tell you now. I mean, apologize to you. It just about killed me, to do that to you with those costumes.”

Helena begins to feel more than a little off-kilter. “Do what to me with which costumes?”

He looks at her like she’s dull-witted. “I’ve costumed you _once_ , Helena. I knew she’d fix them, thought she’d understand, at last, how much talent she has. I had no idea this”—he waves a hand at, basically, the wedding itself—“would be part of the fallout… and I’ll tell you, I did not see Myka’s whole technology thing coming. But that’s Myka for you. Does things her own way, in her own time.”

Helena can barely speak. “Does Myka know this?”

“Beats me. Probably not, but maybe. Tracy weaseled it out of me ages ago, and that girl can’t keep a secret to save her life.”

Late at night, in their bed, their now-marital bed, Helena tells her.

Clearly, Tracy has kept the secret, because: “You are making that up,” Myka says slowly.  Helena suspects she is still a little drunk, for her hands were charmingly clumsy just now, and Myka’s hands are so very rarely anything but meticulously placed.  “He tricked me. I am going to kill him,” Myka goes on, articulating each word very carefully.

Helena kisses her. “No you’re not. Not unless you’re prepared to kill me too, because he did the same thing I did: gave you a problem to solve, in hopes that you would realize something while solving it.”

“I guess I can’t kill you,” Myka says, but her words are a bit less distinct.

“So do you know what you’re going to do instead?”

“No,” Myka says. She’s starting to lose the fight against sleep.  Helena is overcome with tenderness, and overcome with joy that she now can study such tiny motions as the way Myka’s eyelids flutter and twitch right as she’s about to go under.

“You’re going to thank him. And I am too.”

“For what?”

Because if not for _Giselle_ , the costumes, the engineering, the falling completely and ardently in love… but Helena can enumerate all of the links in the chain for Myka tomorrow. What she says to her now is, “For tricking his daughter into helping me become a prima ballerina.”

END

**Author's Note:**

> original tumblr tags: AU week, ballet AU, amatterofcomplication, Roadie, deathtodickens, edwardprendick, the Balanchine thing occurred to me and that was basically the sign, plus then I cast Albrecht and Hilarion, and it was off to the races, and as with Studio, I always wonder what did Helena know and when did she know it


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